Report available workshops on promoting female migrant agency (English and Spanish), October 2018, Spain, organized by the Latin and Caribbean Women Network and Calala

The full report is available from the IV Meeting: “Citizenship and Participation of migrant and refugee women: Consolidating our political agenda”, 19-21 October 2018, Barcelona, Spain, organized in the context of the project “Strengthening Innovative Solutions to Protect Female Migrant and Refugee Rights”, coordinated by WIDE+.
The events in Spain were coordinated/organized by Red de Mujeres Latinoaméricanas y del Caribe and Calala Fund. There were different kind of meetings spanning over three days.

Without aiming to give a complete picture, here are some of the conclusions that give a taste of the richness of insights and recommendations coming from the meetings that can be found in the report:

• The diversity of migrant women groups and activists should connect with occidental white supremacy feminism, breaking the war logic that divides us and that comes from the patriarchal system that promotes division among women. In order to do so, we should be aware of our own class, race, and gender-based oppressions, and know the hegemonic mechanisms of the system that oppress and exclude us (meaning institutional racism or even white feminist groups).

• Violence against migrant women is all over the migration process, in the start point, during the way and in the destination point. We should openly talk about “violences” in Europe, make visible how violent the immigration law is, how racist European society is, and discuss how this inequity affects us.

• The recognition of our political participation is a major struggle that we must deal with. We, the migrant women, have to revendicate our active and passive suffrage right. Also, we need to occupy traditional political places in the political parties, even if we find many obstacles in the way.

• We stand against internal house-work and we demand the abolition of it, as actually it is tolerated by the normative. We consider that the acceptation of internal house-work is the normalisation of slavery practices, that deny internal house-workers the possibility to enjoy decent living conditions. This regime does not include a defined workday and supposes the total disposition of the worker to her employees, this situation affects the worker’s emotional, physical and mental health.

• We can create a “Bank of Cases” or a “Migrant Women Gender-based violence Observatory”. The cases should not collect only the life story but all the process of the case (police and legal).

• We have to support comrades that are working so hard for the legal recognition of the women “feminicide” and that are making political incidence for the inclusion of gender-based violence in the legal framework and execution.

• Political participation is not only about voting, migrant people we participate in many ways in the public sphere, civic spaces, social and community places like the neighborhoods where we live. However, most of the times migrant participation is not always recognised nor valued, and there is an institutionalisation of the participation only possible through the association

• We find difficult to reconcile the institutional association’s schedules (parents associations, civic centers, local forums, etc.) with our longer labor schedules, or with our family responsibilities, to add, we face precarious work conditions as inflexible work schedules, mostly for house-workers.